But when I was a PC/Android user (with an Acer laptop and phones by HTC and Samsung), Apple fans gave me the impression that angels sang every time they opened a MacBook, and that I'd never want to go back to the intolerably uncool world outside the iPhone.

Instead, I was surprised to learn that some parts of the Apple universe are a few steps behind the pace. Using Apple gadgets actually made my life harder, in some ways.

There's no "menu" button on the iPhone.

Kevin Smith / BI

In Android, whenever you get lost you just hit the menu button and you get a bunch of options — such as settings — to help you fix whatever you want to change.

There's no menu button on iPhone. Instead, the home button mostly pulls you out of whatever you are doing and drops you back on your home screen.

Sure, many of the apps and menus inside iPhone have a "back" button. But it's not the same. In iPhone, you have to get used to taking the long way around.

In iPhone, if you want to phone someone you're texting with, you have to scroll all the way up to the top of the message chain to hit the call button. In Android, you just tap the person's name anywhere and a call option pops up.

iPhones are still terrible at being actual phones.

A whole generation has grown up making calls on nothing but the iPhone, and these folks have no idea just how bad iPhone calls are. They think that's just how phones sound.

My new iPhone 5 is on the same network as my old HTC and Samsung phones. Those Androids had such crisp call quality that I did live broadcast radio interviews on them rather than use the hardline in my office.

No more — everyone I call now complains that I sound like I'm calling from a bathroom. And people who call me on an iPhone sound like they're on the bottom of the sea.

In iPhone, there's no Swype, the super-convenient typing tool.

The first time I used my iPhone I was plunged back in time to the early 2000s, when primitive humanoids were forced to peck out messages one letter at a time on their keyboards.

Swype, a special keyboard that can predict text better than the iPhone keyboard and makes typing faster, is built into many Android phones. (If it isn't, you have the option to download Swype from Google's app store and install it on your phone.)

Apple wants your Apple password for EVERYTHING, every time you download an app. Even a free copy of Bejeweled.

Jim Edwards / BI

Apple has a very weird attitude toward batteries.

Steve Kovach/Business Insider

Most Android owners know what this is: It's the battery you see when you pop the back off your phone.

In PC laptops it's the same: you can switch batteries whenever you want.

It's awesome for travelers — just take a spare battery and your machines can last for days.

But Apple doesn't allow you to open its machines to change the battery. So if your battery dies, you're screwed.

You become a battery-life miser on the iPhone.

To be fair, the battery lives on my MacBooks and iPhone are pretty good.

But on the iPhone in particular, I've learned to switch off a lot of the functionality — wireless and screen brightness, for instance — to make sure the thing lasts all day.

With my Android, I could take a spare battery if I was traveling beyond a power outlet. Can't do that with the iPhone.

Apple's desktop navigation is designed to be confusing. Do we really need the desktop and "Launchpad" and "Finder" and "Mission Control" and the "Dock" just to get from A to B?

iTunes only lets you play your music on five different machines.

Apple

For years I happily shuffled my mp3's between various machines, until I got a Mac. Then I discovered iTunes banned me from hearing my own music until I de-authorized one of the five other Mac devices that I'd previously used somewhere along the way.

It's easy to log in on five different machines — your iPhone, your iPod, a work Mac, a home Mac, perhaps an iPad — and then you're out of machines.

I had to go back and de-authorize old Macs I'd used at previous employers — from years ago.

Amazon, by contrast, lets you play music you've bought from it on 10 different machines.

However, Apple does give you the option to pay a bit more for some songs and let you put them on as many computers as you'd like.

iTunes banned me from listening to any mp3 it wasn't familiar with.

Dischord

A detail from the cover of a Minor Threat record.

The most infuriating part of iTunes was when it declined to play any files it couldn't find rights-management codes for.

I had to ghost these onto a CD, and then re-ghost them back into iTunes — so Apple thinks they're from a CD I bought — just to hear them again.

This is my music, that I own, and I paid for, and yet Apple controls where I can listen to it.

Hitting "return" doesn't open files on a Mac.

This is one of the most counter-intuitive parts of the Mac OS: If you highlight a file on the desktop and hit "return," it doesn't open. (On PCs, this is how you open files.)

On a Mac, hitting "return" on a file allows you to change the filename. Given that you need to change filenames far less often than you need to open files, this just feels like bad user-interface design.

My old USB thumb drives don't work properly in Macs.

The simple USB thumb drive is one of the best, most under-rated invention of the last decade. Yet if you try to transfer data to an Apple using a USB drive formatted on a PC, you might be out of luck. Certain USB formats don't work fully on Mac.

Really annoying.

The App Store doesn't have IrfanView.

IrfanView

There are some really great apps that have been available for years on PCs that can't be used on Macs. I really miss IrfanView, the super-simple, super-fast photo-editing software for people who can't be bothered with Photoshop.

Apple's function keys are designed to screw you.

Jim Edwards / BI

Look at the way the function, control, option and command keys are placed right next to each other on the MacBook keyboard.

I've been using my Mac for a year now and I still hit the wrong function key several times a day, plunging me into "Mission Control" or "page up" or some other unwanted destination.

On PCs, the function keys are offset from each other both vertically AND horizontally, so you can tell by touching them which one you've landed on.

PDF files are a crazy lottery!

Adobe

On PCs, PDF files just open into your browser like web pages. Everyone uses Adobe Acrobat to open them.

But because Apple has its own PDF viewer, Preview, you never know what's going to happen when you hit a PDF link on the web. Will it open like a web page? Will it download directly into your download folder? Will you need to change the filename suffix? Will it do nothing?

Who knows! It's Preview!

I'm told I can fix this by using Chrome instead of Safari — but isn't it weird that I need to use a Google browser to get an Apple machine to work properly?